A top-secret NSA document leaked to The Intercept reveals that Russia engaged in election-hacking efforts just days prior to the 2016 election, directly contradicting claims made by former President Barack Obama.

Then-President Obama said at a news conference in late December that Russia ceased its election-hacking efforts after he told Russian President Vladimir Putin to “cut it out” in early September.

Obama warned the Russian president of “serious consequences” if he didn’t stop the Kremlin’s election tampering efforts.

“What I was concerned about in particular was making sure [the DNC hack] wasn’t compounded by potential hacking that could hamper vote counting, affect the actual election process itself,” Obama said in late December. “So in early September when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out and there were going to be serious consequences if he didn’t. And in fact we did not see further tampering of the election process.”

The New York Times applauded Obama’s ability to stop Russia dead in its tracks.

“The president made it sound like that worked,” the Times reported, noting Obama’s claim that “we did not see further tampering of the election process.”

But the NSA documents published Monday by The Intercept reveal that Russian military intelligence conducted cyber attacks against elections-related software as late as Oct. 31 or Nov. 1.

“The NSA assessed that this phase of the spear-fishing operation was likely launched on either Oct 31 or Nov 1 and sent spear-fishing emails to 122 email addresses ‘associated with named local government organizations,’ probably to officials ‘involved in the management of voter registration systems,’” The Intercept reported.

The alleged hacking occurred more than a month after Obama told Putin to “cut it out.”

The leaked NSA document cited information that became available in April 2017, so it’s likely that Obama wasn’t aware he was misleading the public in his December statement that Russia ceased its efforts at tampering with the American election process in September.

The revelation lends credence to President Donald Trump’s statement in February, in which he questioned whether Obama was too soft on Russia.

Crimea was TAKEN by Russia during the Obama Administration. Was Obama too soft on Russia?

The leaked NSA document draws no conclusion on how successful the late October Russian hacking operation was, and whether it had any effect on the outcome of the election.

A U.S. intelligence officer cautioned “against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.”

But 58 percent of Democratic voters believe Russia directly tampered with vote tallies in order to get Trump elected, according to an Economist/YouGov poll conducted in May.

The fact that so many Democratic voters believe Russia directly affected vote tallies, despite the lack of evidence to support that claim, proves that many Democratic voters remain unconvinced that their candidate legitimately lost the election.

“Elections do two things: one choose the winner, and two, they convince the loser,” Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity expert at Harvard’s Berkman Center, told The Intercept. “To the extent the elections are vulnerable to hacking, we risk the legitimacy of the voting process, even if there is no actual hacking at the time.”

“It’s not just that [an election] has to be fair, it has to be demonstrably fair, so that the loser says, ‘Yep, I lost fair and square.’ If you can’t do that, you’re screwed,” Schneier added. “They’ll tear themselves apart if they’re convinced it’s not accurate.”

Trump’s strategy is not for blame. He is a clever man and knows what to do. Unlike Obama. It is sad that so many Democrats still trust their party full of lies.